Under the direction of David Chester, Ph.D., the SPN Lab seeks to understand why people try to harm one another. Decades of research have revealed what types of people are aggressive (e.g., narcissists, psychopaths) and what situations bring out violent tendencies (e.g., heat, insults). However, the psychology community has yet to fully understand the feelings and thoughts that come in between such inputs and their aggressive outcomes.

Funding for the SPN Lab's research comes from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology and the R.S. Lipman Research Fund for the Prevention of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.